PRINTED FROM MIT PRESS SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.mitpress.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright The MIT Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in MITSO for personal use (for details see http://www.mitpress.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 March 2018

Introduction

Introduction

André Orléan

Publisher:

The MIT Press

DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262026970.003.0001

The main body of the book is divided into three parts, aimed at emphasizing the internal consistency of the neoclassical paradigm while pointing out its limitations; demonstrating that money is a social institution that drives the entire machinery of market exchange; and showing that the notion of objective financial value, and indeed the traditional theory of value as a whole, must be abandoned. It is argued that the underlying logic of financial markets is essentially mimetic, and that this imitative dynamic is the source of the misalignment sometimes observed between prices in the real economy and in financial markets. The failure of the neoclassical paradigm to take into account this and other aspects of market behavior is at the root of the current crisis in economic theory.

MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

PRINTED FROM MIT PRESS SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.mitpress.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright The MIT Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in MITSO for personal use (for details see http://www.mitpress.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 March 2018